During one of my interviews this week, I asked the interviewers what some of their biggest challenges were at their library. One of the challenges they mentioned was keeping all the staff on the same page about policy changes and news when people worked varying shifts. This is a common issue in libraries. The fines for late videos change, a new printer is bought with new procedures for troubleshooting it, or a meeting is rescheduled, and it’s difficult to disseminate the news to all of the staff. When I worked in a public library, there was a memo pad that contained all of the important news that we needed to know. But it was easy to forget to look at the notebook, things were sometimes written in illegible handwriting, and it was difficult to make changes to or to link new news to older related news. I always thought it would be great to have something online — an intranet, a blog, or something — where the news would be easy to change and disseminate, and would be accessible from any computer.
Yesterday, Steven Cohen wrote a great post about using blogs and wikis for internal communications in libraries and other organizations. In it, he referred to Jotspot, a great new way to create an intranet wiki. I took a look and was equally smitten. Check it out for yourself!
Don’t know why all this would be useful? Take a look at Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More, a useful presentation on various administrative uses of these social applications. Rochelle Mazar also wrote about various practical uses for administrative blogs in libraries.
I know more and more libraries are using blogs for the public side of their web presence, but how many are actually using blogs and wikis for their own internal communications? I’d love to hear some success stories!
I set up a wordpress blog for reference desk staff where I work, and it has been working out very well.
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